Published: 29 June 2022
Caroline Jarrett
Hello everyone. This is Caroline Jarrett with the User Experience podcast.
You'd be maybe a bit surprised that today I'm being the host, but I suggested today that my guest would be Gerry Gaffney.
So Gerry, welcome to the user experience podcast. I think you've been here before.
Gerry Gaffney
Thanks Caroline. Good to be here.
Caroline
So I've heard a very tricky rumour, which is that I believe that you are considering retiring the UXpod. So tell me a little bit more about that.
Gerry
Well, as I think, you know, it's been on the go since 2006, which is quite a number of years now and where I've met lots of interesting people and got to learn lots of interesting stuff, it just got to the stage where it's sort of come to an, it feels for me, it's come to a natural end and that I should probably, you know, let it let it die down from my life at least without extending the pain any further. [Laughter.] That sounds very negative though. You know what I mean?Caroline
That, that sounds a bit negative. I mean, I've so much enjoyed listening to your episodes over the years and I've really, really thank you, appreciated the privilege of actually being on the interviewee side. And so that's why I thought, well, it might be fun to turn the tables and get you to be the person who's answering the questions so that we can hear a little bit about reflecting on what it's been like, having the experience of the whole podcasting thing. So I've certainly greatly enjoyed it.
So in my mind, back in 2006, I think you were one of the pioneers of podcasting. What prompted you to start?
Gerry
Well, I don’t know that I'd use the word pioneer exactly because I'm sure there were other podcasts around, although to be honest, Caroline, I can't remember things that happened 16 years ago, so I, I can't, you know I, I don't even know. And I know one of the things you were going to ask me, I think was what the rationale was for kicking it off in the first place.
And I, I thought, well, that's a really interesting question. I even had a look earlier on today. I said, surely, surely I wrote down some sort of mission statement or desideratum or something all those years back, but nah, there's nothing.
At the time I had done on, on my company website on the Infodesign website a number of sort of one-page articles on, you know, What is usability testing, What is contextual inquiry, What is card sorting and stuff like that, which I thought were pretty good content.
And they served a dual purpose. I mean, one was sort of being part of the whole UX community. And another one is being self-serving of course, because when you, when you publish things like that, when they do get a certain readership, then it gives you a degree of credibility as well.
So I quite enjoyed that, but that came to a natural end rather more quickly than after 16 years, because I’d sort of run out of topics and then podcasting was around and I thought I'll do a couple of fireside chat type things as I imagined them. So I did a couple where it was just me talking for a 10 minute or 15 minute slots, and that was fine. But, you know, I realized fairly quickly it was much easier to get people like yourself on as guests and, you know, do all the talking while I would just sit back and toss a couple of questions into the water and watch the ripples going out.
So that's really as much of a rationale as I had for it, to be honest.
Caroline
Well, I think even if you didn't have a very clear rationale, it certainly worked because over the years there's been some compelling content that I've thoroughly enjoyed listening to.
So just tell me, reflecting back, are there any particular episodes or interviews that really stood out for you. And please don't mention ones with me because I really don't want to hear about myself, but tell me if there were any that just particularly resonated with you.
Gerry
Well, you know, it's funny because earlier on today I sat, because we're doing this in my evening, your morning, I sat down and I went through all the list of, you know, 130-odd episodes and, you know, had a quick squiz at the transcripts, because I'm not actually much of a listener to be honest myself. So I had a, had a look at the at the transcripts and I, you know, I didn't sort of divide them up, but I came up probably with probably a longer list than you want here.
But there was a couple of things. Like there was a few that were, if you like foundational, like Alan Cooper was one of the early people that we had on and he was talking about personas and he was very definitive description of what a persona is given that it's, you know, really his invention, I guess he's entitled to do so. You know, and he talked about the value of planning and he said things like if you're working for an organization that doesn't get the need for planning and the need for UX, then do it anyway. And if you get fired, you're better off because you don't want to work for those people, you know, in his usual sort of acerbic, slightly acerbic fashion. I really enjoyed talking to him.
I had Jakob Nielsen on around the same time too. And I actually wrote down a little quote from Jakob because he was talking about, I think I asked him about whether usability had implications beyond just the user interface or whether it should have relevance to government and politics and stuff like that. And he kind of hummed and hawed a little bit about that. And, but when he is talking specifically about government, he said:
"We know that requirements specifications are always wrong and yet that's the way government, computer contracts work. And so they're always behind schedule. They're always over budget and they always develop interfaces that are horribly complicated to use and their websites are miserable and it's very hard for citizens to do self-service online or find information on government websites."
And I thought that really resonated with me partly because the other person I was going to mention was yourself on forms design, because you were one of the earliest people that I interviewed too on forms design.
And you know, the work that you did I think was, was really transformative in many ways. And I'm not sending us specifically, but you know, the work that you did and particularly the work you did with others in GOV.UK, I know equivalent work in the US and in other, other governments around the work world has been so effective in giving citizens, you know, at least half-decent access to most of the services they require.
I mean, sometimes it's become a bit formulaic. A colleague of mine, Rajeev Arora, I don't think, you know him, he sent me a screen grab a couple of months back and obviously it had been, somebody had followed the, the guidelines of how to do things. And the, there was a question, it was an application for a death certificate and there was a question, who is this death certificate for, and it was "yourself" or "another person."
So I think you can fall into that trap, but like government services have improved so much. So talking to those three people was kind of really foundational, I think for a lot of the stuff that followed.
You know, more recently, I guess people talking about you know, we had Eva Penzeymoog talking about designing for safety, you know, how products can cause harm, how any product can cause harm and how you should be gamestorming the harm that your product can cause during the design phase and trying to engineer it out and make sure that it doesn't in fact happen. So she, I found her really interesting.
A lot of the, a lot of these episodes are things where I learned a lot, either doing the research for them and reading the books in advance or during the sessions themselves. So she was really interesting.
Also Sara Wachter-Boettcher on, her book was "Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms and Other Threats of Toxic Tech." And she talked about, you know, AI being based on the prejudices of, you know, the, I don't think she used the term bro culture, but you know, the whole Silicon valley thing. And she talked about the failure of blaming pipeline for a lack of diversity in the, in the tech sector, I guess.
Sort of similar to that was Christoph Bartneck talking about AI and ethics. And we talked about whether AI would ever have personhood and that, that was kind of an, an interesting area.
So I've got this list here, Caroline and I'm just sort of rushing through. So I mean, feel free to, to stop me on any of them.
Caroline
No, keep going, please, please keep going. Yeah, go for it.
Gerry
All right. I tried to, I, you know, I printed out a set of my, like I excluded a lot on sort of random grounds and then I tried to kind of group them, but I didn't do a card sort or anything. I just wrote little notes down beside them… [Laughter.]Caroline
[Laughs.] Spontaneous thoughts are great.
Gerry
Yes, that's right. So, I mean, there were two on designing for children, which was Debra Levin Gelman who wrote a book "Design for Kids: Digital Products for Playing and Learning." And she was really very, very entertaining, but very interesting too, about how to design for and with children. And one of the things I learned from her was about the parental threshold for the revolting or PTR. And that was saying, you know, the fact that you can't just design products for kids, because particularly in the, I think she said the 5 to 7 year group, they'll want things that have diarrhoea and mucus and dirt in them, and you can't sell that to the parents. So even though they suit the end users, they don't suit the customer of what you're designing. And then Tim Gill who’s written a really good book called "Urban Playground: How Child-Friendly Planning and Design Can Save Cities." And he was really fascinating. I mean, he's an amazing character. He's English and a really, really interesting guy. And he, he helps cities around the world to design elements that are child-friendly. And one of the things that really struck me, he was quoting somebody else. But he said that the number of playgrounds in a city is inversely proportional to the liveability of a city. In other words, that a playground is an indicator of a space. That's not liveable because you have to corral the children into an area that's away from the city because the city itself is so dangerous. So he was, he was really interesting to listen to. You know, these are ones that I, you know, that I'll probably go back and re-read and, and re-listen to myself, we can obviously put a list of them in the transcript.
And then when it came to cities that kind of blended into, I guess you know, urban design and traffic and that sort of stuff.
I had Tom Vanderbilt who wrote a book called "Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)," and it was really, really interesting just about, about driving and modal bias about the way drivers, you know, tend to see other drivers as themselves and others are othered. And the same for pedestrians or cyclists or whatever. But that, that was a really fascinating book. And he was very interesting to talk to.
Also we had Jarrett Walker on who's from Portland, Oregon originally, and he designs public transit systems around the world including Dublin incidentally, relatively recently. And he just talked about, a lot of the principles that he applies are really UX principles, although he doesn't talk about UX. And one of the things that sort of brought it home for me, when I was looking at the transcript today, he said we were talking about trams or street cars is the Americans call them. And he said, think about the question before you fall in love with the technology in a particular place. Like one of the things we say in Melbourne is we need a train to the airport because we don't have a train to the airport. And when he was on, he says, actually, you don't need a train to the airport. What you need is to dedicate… if you want the quickest bang for your buck, you've got a really good frequent bus service. All you need to do is dedicate lane at, and back from the airport to that bus and voila, you've actually fixed your problem, you know, so interesting in, in framing things not around the solution you want, but the problem that you're trying to, you know, the standard UX type of stuff, I guess.
You know, then things like visual design had Alberto Cairo on who's written several books that you'd know, like one of them is "The Truthful Art: Data Charts and Maps for Communication."And he's got a journalism background and he's just a fantastic character, really, really nice person. And so interesting to listen to him talking about data visualization and storytelling with charts. And that kind of reminded me of Dave Gray. We had Dave Gray on way, way back in the piece when he was just really transitioning from journalism, I think, into doing visual design. And then again, as a repeat interviewee, when he did his stuff on liminal thinking, he's just one of those really interesting people. Who's, who's, who's very bright and got a lot of ideas.
He reminds me in, in an odd kind of way of Jesse James Garrett, you know, Jesse is very articulate and very thoughtful in the way he talks about things.
I guess one of the things about that is, you know, what, sometimes an episode will really interest me or the content will really interest me. And then I'll be talking to somebody at a conference afterwards and say, oh, that that guy was, he was really boring. And I've heard that about a few people that they're really like something that I thought was meh, okay, and then, you know, other things were boring.And then I guess a lot of the other ones were really about, you know, more specific technical things like how to do onboarding or how to write help content and, and these sorts of things. But look, there, there are a few that I picked out.
I really enjoyed Tomer Sharon talking about you know, the, in how to invalidate your, your product ideas. I thought was a really interesting approach to product validation. And he talked about personas which are, you know, personas that don't have any data about them. And we had a bit of a chat about MVP, minimum viable product, which I think is one of those kind of poisonous concepts. I mean, I don't think this concept is poisoned, but it's been applied in a way that's become a real cop-out. And you know, I think it gives people permission to produce really, really crappy products. Because they say, well, it's just an MVP, which doesn't really, you know, it doesn't mean anything.
Sorry, that's a, a non-breathing run-through of some of the top ones that come to mind.
Caroline
[Laughs.] no, it it's been great. I mean, it just shows what a breadth of things you've covered over the years. You know, you've had sort of foundational topics really aimed more at what should I say, people are reasonably getting started in UX. And then, you know, some of the ones around ethics, harm, technically wrong.
I mean, Sara Wachter-Boettcher's books. I really, really love. And, and in particular there's another book by her and Eric Meyer, which is called Design For Real Life." And, and I love that book so much that I ordered about 50 copies and handed them out to people because it was one of the first books out that really encourage people to look beyond, you know, oh, we've got to deliver this to a user, and to think about what might be happening in the life of that user, so those things around ethics and intentional harm, and of course, you know, hearing about the kids and the things that we need, that the children would like about pee and pooh are not the things that the parents would like.
I think even those of us who are not working with children can learn something from that because we are often in a situation where, what the stakeholders think they want and what the users actually want are got some way apart. So I think it was great to hear some of the breadth of what's there in the archive. I’d really encourage people to go back and pick and choose now because the archive, I hope you'll be keeping the archive up for people to come and listen to or read as they prefer in the future.
Gerry
Yeah. For, for the foreseeable future. That that's the intent. I mean, I, I'm not going to kill it, not going to kill the baby.
You reminded me one of the things that Tim Gill said, you talked about designing for what the users want and not what the other stakeholders might want or what the product developers want. He gave a lovely example that we can sort of relate to, I think in general. He talked about finding out what kids wanted in a play area and an area that they would play in. He said they were observing one little boy. I don’t know how old the boy was. But he went into the play area and he got on a swing and he spent about three minutes on the swing. And then he got, and he started playing the dirt. He played carrying water to the dirt and making whatever he was making for about 20 minutes or 25 minutes. And then at the end they interviewed him. They said, well, what do you like about the area? And the kid turned around and pointed at the swing, you know, and how the way we frame the question gives us the answer that that person is expecting. You know, like the, what the kid really liked was the 25 minutes, what he focused on was the 25 minutes playing in the dirt. But what he pointed at was this piece of play equipment when asked what he liked about the, the play area.Caroline
Yeah. It's really a lesson for us all in, in the value of actually observing people as well as asking them questions, isn't it? You know, so to me, the ones that I personally have enjoyed the most have been the ones with people like Alberta Cairo, Dave Gray and, and the, the transit ones, the ones which have been about people perhaps a bit outside of, people who are not what you might say up to their eyebrows in UX, but are bringing a really user centred, thoughtful approach to other domains of life where we can learn from it and think about reflecting on our practice. I'd never find them boring. I love all those episodes.
Gerry
You reminded me that one of the episodes that I really enjoyed was there's a guy called Matiu Bush. Who's Australia based. And he had a project. Well, I can't remember if this is what he called a project, but it was designing for the best death possible. So he was working in, he had a nursing background and he was coming, looking and working within aged care and end of life facilities. And he, you know, he had just done this amazing piece of work and stakeholder engagement and observational work with families and with people in the, in these sorts of places. But one of the things he said, that he learned a lot from looking at what veterinarians did. And he said, one family had had a dog die around the same time as a parent died. And they said from the, from the vet, they got a photo of the dog and a little card saying, you know, sorry about your loss and blah, blah, blah. And from the aged care facility, they got a bill, you know, just an invoice.
Caroline
Oh my God.
Gerry
You know, he was just saying like, we are learning from animal care, how to look after people in this sort of situation, which was, you know, really interesting. I thought.
Caroline
That's, that's amazing. And in fact, I, while we're just, just on that tangentially, I'm just going to do something probably I shouldn't do, but I'm going to do anyway, which is to give a little shout out for my friend, Jane Matthews has written a little book, which really ought to be better known. And it's about coping with the loss of a pet.
I'll have to send you the exact name for it for the transcript later [It's Losing a Pet: coping with the death of your beloved animal], but you know, that sort of thing about learning from other domains, like end of life care for a pet compared to end of life care for people. I mean, it's a shocking example, but to me, it's, it encapsulates some of the really interesting interviews where looking at another domain and what people are doing in it can really help to inform our own practice in UX.
But I'm gonna take you back to something you mentioned a little bit further ago, which was contrasting Jakob Nielsen's condemnation of the requirements based thing in government with what I hope is modern practice, a lot of government now, which is much more agile and a bit more user centred and, and doing things in a more user experience focused sort of way.
So over those 16 years, that's one of the major changes. Is there anything else that you've now are looking back and reflecting a bit that you've seen as being dominant changes over the time of the podcast?
Gerry
Well, I mean, there there've been so many changes. The iPhone came in, for example after the podcast started, you know, and that was obviously revolutionary in terms of you know, user interface and how people perceived the user interface.
But I, I think that government accessed for citizens is really quite revolutionary. I think the systematization that's horrible word, isn't it. But the systematization of things that we do is, has been really interesting. So we've now got things like design systems where, you know, organizations be it government or you know private companies have got design systems. So when you go in you don't have to reinvent the wheel and I guess for a lot of people, it refers fairly narrowly to the UI components and we've got templates that show, you know, if you're, if you're building this type of screen, then these are the elements that you've got to put in there. You don't have to start messing around with pixels on screen. It it's all set for you.
I think that's, that's really fantastic.
It does occur to me sometimes that UI design has to be exposed to the advent of AI that, you know, that's the sort of thing we could, we could really get machines to do. I remember designing printed circuit boards for electronics devices, way back in the day. And, you know, it was, it was a manual process and now you just give it the circuit diagram and it, you know, the machine goes and, and creates it and, and builds it for you. And, you know, some of the, some of the work that we do now in the UI space is almost at that commoditized level, I think where we could say, well, here's, here's what we want to design, and here's a machine go off and go off and do the design and even potentially you know, run unmoderated, remote usability tests, AB testing, and those sorts of things, and come back with improvements.
I mean, that's probably a bit, a bit speculative, a bit down the track.
You know, some of the things that haven’t changed are interesting. I was thinking the other day, like a lot, a lot of the work that I really enjoy doing now is that observational research where you're sitting down, watching people, interviewing them about what they're doing, whether it be you know, in work circumstances or leisure or whatever it is that you're, you're working to design with them, and that sort of research hasn't, you, it's still doing the same sort of thing. You’ve got to get out of the building as they say, you’ve got to go out, get your hands dirty. And there's no real shortcut for that. And that's still very much the same. We've got some tools for doing the analysis that make it a little bit easier. You know, things like you know, Airtable or Miro or whatever you happen to use can make it a little bit better, but it's still, you have to sit down with this huge mass of messy data and try and figure out what it means, and then come back with scenarios or journeys or whatever artefacts you want to use to explain them.Just on the thing of artefacts. I think one of the kind of negative things that's, that's happened. It's not across the board, but we see a lot of people developing artefacts for the sake of it. So, you know, we've got problem X, what do we need to do? Oh, let's make a customer journey map. Well, okay. Why, what's that going to do for you, you know? So we create artefacts sometimes without thinking about why are we creating that artefact and what are we going to do once we have that artifact? We're like, how is it going to actually make something better. And not just artefacts, but what individual activities are we going to undertake?
And I think to some extent, you know, the way the, the work that, the really good work that's been done by uk.gov [GOV.UK] and others has given a set of instructions to people. And sometimes they pick up that recipe book, you know, and they open it up in front of them, they don't, and they start to cook and they don't maybe think about what, what the end result of that meal is actually going to be. And I think the result is you get something that's good, but it could be better.
Caroline
Yeah. So I guess that's an interesting, that following a particular formula can turn out something formulaic, but has it actually challenged people a bit to think about what would be the best thing or what, what are they trying to achieve with all of it?
Gerry
Exactly. Yeah.Caroline
So what, let's look a bit more as well, into something that you were talking about in the podcast, which was the, the topics of cycling and transit. I know that outside of UX, you are very much into your cycling and advocating cycling as a way of getting around. What's it like cycling in Melbourne these days? And is that still a big topic for you?
Gerry
I do ride ride the push bike when I commute, if I can. And when I go into the gym and you know, when I, when I'm traveling around, I like it very much. I guess, to me, it's about liveable cities. I mean, we know we know what the future city needs to be like. I mean, we know there's needs to be reasonably dense. We know, we know it needs to be sustainable. We know it needs to be walkable. We know it needs to be bicycle friendly. And we know that the private motor vehicle has a place, but it's a much, much diminished place from the sacrosanct area that it's got now.
And, you know, I was in London a little while back, a few weeks back and, you know, the way London has improved from enabling people to cycle safely is enormous. I know there are tensions there and there are problems and, and there's conflict between the different road users, but it's so much, well, I personally feel it's so much better as a city, as a result of that.
And there was a lot of things that went into that, there was congestion pricing, there was design of the, the super highways, I think Ken Livingstone's time originally, and then, you know, your old mate Boris Johnson as well in his time as, as mayor. [Laughs.] But let's not talk about that. But you know, like that made a big difference. Dublin has come on a long way. I was in Paris as well. You know, Anne Hidalgo has done amazing work in Paris to try and, you know, rein in the prevalence of the private motor vehicle and the damage that it does to society and to our health and our wellbeing.
I can't remember the question you asked at the start of that… [Laughs.]Caroline
Well, it was keep up the good fight, really. I mean, you know, the question was really, are you, are you still keen on cycling and advocating cycling. And it's great to situate it as you've done in the liveable city and what liveable cities might look like in the future.
And I suppose I'm going into dangerous ground here, because I know that you are now a Melbournian and live in Melbourne, but are how are things going in Sydney? Because at one time Sydney seemed to be a positively anti-cycling city from what I could learn about from the other side of the world.Gerry
Yeah. Well Cadel Evans who's, you know, a well known Australian racing cyclist actually refused to cycle in Sydney. But this is going back 10 years or so. Sydney had a lot of political issues. There was a mayor who was very much, you know, a leftist mayor and very keen on cycle lanes. And then there was a state government that was very keen on not doing anything about that. And they did things like pulling out cycle lanes that the, that the council put in, which is just crazy stuff. I haven't personally cycled in Sydney for years and I haven't been to Sydney for the last couple of years. So I'm kind of reluctant to comment on it. It used to be very hostile to cyclists just because of bad design. Melbourne is, you know, is getting there, but it depends where you are.
I mean, I'm in a fairly zhuzhy neighbourhood, as you know here, Caroline, and our local council has done literally nothing for 10 years except the tokenistic measure of painting some bicycles on some already very quiet roads around the place. So as William Gibson said the future is here, but it's not evenly distributed.
We're getting there. You know, people are starting to realize that I think one of the positive things that came out of lockdown and COVID for us was a lot of people got back on the bikes and families. You saw a lot of families back on the bikes and it, it did. I think it did resuscitate to some extent an activity that probably needed it.
Caroline
Yeah. A friend, a friend of mine had actually resigned from an engineering job to go into bicycle building just before lockdown. And he was really worried because it was quite a major deal for his family that he'd done this big change of direction. And they were just incredibly busy, you know? Yeah. They couldn't keep up with the demand for, for cycling. So maybe that's just one of the very many changes that lockdown has inflicted on all of us. I think I want to change tack a little bit…
Gerry
Oh, good. Because I was going to go on about that for another 20 minutes at least. [Laughter.]
Caroline
Well, maybe that's a subject for another day. But if just changing tack, if someone did decide, oh, you know what, there's going to be a gap without this podcast in our lives anymore. And maybe I want to take up the challenge of doing thoughtful in-depth interviews with people who have things to say useful things to say about UX. What would your top tips be to someone who was considering starting a podcast?
Gerry
Well, you know, if I were starting again, I'd try and learn from my mistakes because there were a lot of things that I did that probably did not end up in the most efficient production schedule, let's say.
So, you know, use templates for everything. I mean, I guess when I, you know, some of, some of the sound quality is pretty bad on some of my podcasts, but then again, you know, we didn't have decent VOIP. So, you know, Voice Over IP was not a readily available thing. Some of them were done on telephone. Some of them were literally done, you know, while sitting in the lobby somewhere with things going on around, but like try and concentrate on getting good sound, concentrate on the technical aspects and templating and making sure you get those things right, because they're the things that can cost you time that you don't want to be spending later on.
And then the other thing is to just read a lot or listen a lot, or go to conferences a lot or network a lot. And whenever you see somebody interesting, who's passionate, just grab them and say, Hey, I want, I want, you know, I want to interview you on, on a podcast.
Because it's the people, when I look at the list of the, the ones that I picked out, there are people who are all passionate about what they, what they know and they want to talk about it to other people. So really all you have to do is drop the stone in the water and the ripples will go out. I mean, they will talk at length. And, and in fact, your job really is to just try and reel them in a little bit and redirect them as appropriate.
So, you know, just get out and identify interesting, interesting content, but it really depends what you want to get out of it. I mean, are you trying to be self-promoting are you trying to educate people? Are you, do you want to make money out of it? You know, I've never done, I've never done any of those things arguably but, you know, I guess have, have a rationale for what you're doing it, but the, you know, the internet, I mean, sounds very old fashioned to say, but the internet has put everyone within reach. You know, prior to 2006, if I'd wanted to contact, you know, the, the kind of superhero designers at the time, it would've been quite difficult, but now you can just ping anyone. You can get in touch with anyone. And if they're, if they're genuinely interested in what they're doing, they'll probably be happy to give you a half an hour of their time to talk to you.
Caroline
I think that sounds great. But I have to say I'm going to not take up the baton myself of running a podcast. I'm going to rely on the goodwill of other people, such as yourself who've hosted me over the years and I suppose my final question really is that now that you are planning not to be doing podcasting anymore what are your plans for using up the free time that this will undoubtedly create in your life?
Gerry
Well, you know, free time doesn't exist as you well know. There are always activities that will move into, you know, it's like the vacuum, something will move in to take the place. I've just got so many things on podcasting as oh each, each episode probably did cost me a couple of days. And then there's a lot of reading around that as well. You know, it's, I don't think it's going to make that big a difference to my life, not having the podcast in it. I mean, I'm glad to have done it. But you know, I continue to do little bits and pieces of UX work. I'm lucky enough that I can be a bit choosy now about what I do. You know, I'm particularly interested in user research, but not so much in the UI design and the prototyping and the usability testing and all those things, which, you know, I think in the old days you had to do all of that as part of the package. So I don't think, I don't foresee there will be any more free time, really, as a result of not, not doing the podcast, to be honest.
You know this, that's a trick question, you know well that's a trick question, Caroline. [Laughter.]Caroline
I guess it was a bit of a trick question and just, you know the, the other day I was doing a crit of a questionnaire for some clients and, and one of the things in the thing was, was a question that basically was I, do you do this in order to use up, to occupy yourself in spare time or something like that. I thought, well, I don't really know that anybody in 2022 just has acres of, you know, time where they feel bored and they haven't got anything to do. You know, we seem to have constant pressures of, of everyday life on us.
I guess really, I just want to wrap up by thanking you, thanking you very much. I mean, on a personal level, I’ve really, really appreciated the opportunities I've had to come and rant on about whatever was the topic of the time.
And also again, on a personal level, how many times I've just really enjoyed hearing somebody I might not have otherwise heard or hearing somebody that I knew very well, but had a chance to reflect a bit more on something that, perhaps a different aspect of a book that I'd already enjoyed, or that led me to a book or their work I wouldn't otherwise have heard about. So I'm going to wrap up here by just thanking you on behalf of the user experience community for all those many, many years of hard work and to recommend to people who haven't yet come across the podcast go back, you know, pick an episode. Gerry's mentioned some brilliant ones and there'll be others that I'm sure you'll find really interesting.
So thanks very much, Gerry. And I'm sorry that we're saying goodbye to it.
Gerry
Oh, well, you know, all good things must come to an end, but thanks so much for, for organizing this because this you're the one who, who made this happen.
And, you know, the things that you described those experiences of, of coming across stuff and, and learning and finding out is exactly what I was doing when I was on exactly the same journey in producing the podcast as hopefully people listening and reading. So thank you.